Ink Blotting - Hitman

Posted on Monday, December 03, 2007 at 12:00 AM

Hitman

Starring the ever changing Timothy Olyphant, whose list of theatrical performances surprised even me, Hitman is a decent 90 odd minutes in length. I say decent because most of the time it feels like you're catching extremely interesting and well-done cut-scenes in an action packed video game. The rest of the time you're unfortunately just watching a buddy play the game with exceptional skill and button-mashing splendour. I'm not against it. But it definitely isn't for most crowds; as evinced by the horrible rating the reviews have piled up over at Rotten Tomatoes. Sometimes I think people just assume that the position "critic" gives them license to say horrible and negative things regarding whatever it is they are supposed to be critiquing. The majority of reviews Rotten Tomatoes has linked and listed have incendiary and vehement comments, I believe, to spur on hate mail from those that enjoyed the movie. After all, if someone disagrees with you, they'll let you know it and that means they read your work to begin with.

But a movie like Hitman has qualities that soar well beyond that 11% Rotten Tomatoes has ranked it at. There's tremendous cinematography, well-grounded in it's video game roots. Colors sparkle when needed, the appropriate amount of blood is sprayed and splashed in the appropriate directions and most importantly, people look interesting and anything other than dull and cold as Jack Mathews over at the New York Daily News cites.

The relationships between the characters is also interesting, and rather than quote him verbatim, I highly recommend that, if you're at all waffling about whether or not to see the movie, you wander by the writings of Roger Ebert and see what he has to say, eloquently and enjoyably, about the film. I couldn't do justice to the comments he makes regarding the socio-political commentary the movie makes about present day Russia or about how unique and intriguing the relationship is between our principle #47 and Nika.

What I can say is, if the preview intrigues you, go see the movie and you shouldn't be disappointed. But if you're not interested in a shoot-em up with a touch of socio-political commentary then don't go see it. But for movies of it's type - it's definitely ...

3 out of 4 stars.

Kyle Gould is a University of Calgary Graduate in English devoutly trying to make the 25,000 dollar piece of parchment not just a glorified ink blot. Currently it would serve better as a Rorschach test. Feel free to throw some ink his way at wkkgould@hotmail.com.